10 lessons from £20M

Read time: 7 minutes

Hey, welcome back.

Last week, I wrote about compounding knowledge.

​You can read that (and all past issues, here).

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Today, I'm sharing a huge milestone in the quest to reaching my Heights, and sharing the lessons of success along the way so I can hopefully inspire you to join me there too.

My company, Heights just surpassed £20M ARR (annual recurring revenue) from an awesome 45,000 monthly subscribing customers.

This is all off just 4 products, on one channel - Heights.com and a team of just 19 people.

So, to celebrate - I want to share 20 lessons I've learned to this point - some that will resonate, others that may surprise you.

10 lessons

OK, let's get into this and I am just going to share the most valuable one first - so you can sack off the rest of the lessons if you like and win back your time....

1. The most important thing, is to keep the most important thing, the most important thing.

There are distractions everywhere, and if you have ADHD like me, they are all so tempting. You can probably only ever do one thing really well at any one time.

For Heights - we decided the most important thing was to nail D2C subscription off our own website. This means endless experiments, non stop conversion rate optimisation, ad testing, messaging testing, etc.

This also meant always saying no. No to partnerships, no to amazon, no to retail, no to every cool thing that came up that would take up time, headspace, team energy and distract us away from being incredible at doing one thing really well.

We dont want to settle for well either. We want to be great. Greatness always comes with sacrifice. To keep the most important thing the most important thing, you have to say no to all the other things.

The Lesson? Focus.

OK, I'll make these much shorter.

2. Clarity comes after commitment, not before.​
You don’t need to know where you’re going to start. You need to start to know where you’re going. Heights started as a newsletter called Dawn. I thought we were going to make recipes, then an app. Had no plan to make supplements. Things change. Now we're at £20M.

Lesson: Just start and see where the journey takes you.

3. The market isn’t rational, it’s human.​
We pretend people buy supplements for science. They buy them because they want hope, reassurance, and the feeling they’re looking after themselves. We knew we had the purest products, and did the most scientific trials, we even proved our probiotic was 50x more effective than the top competitors in Europe. None of that worked. What did was the emotional storytelling about how we help people reach their Heights - the science is just a stepping stone to the outcome.

Lesson: Work out what you are selling, then find the human reason people want it.

4. Growth isn't all about new customers.​
​When we started we focused on one metric only: month 1 churn. In supplements the industry churn rate is 60%. That means for every 100 customers that buy your product in month 1, only 40 are left in month 2.

We knew that with a bunch of tweaks & proper thought, we could change that. Investing in the best ingredients, doing the science research, designing an award winning unique bottle, creating a subscription service, focusing on email comms... doing everything best in class to work out how to impress and keep our customers - would pay off. Our retention in year 1? 8%. Of 100 people who joined in month 1, 92 stayed in month 2. 45,000 customers later - that number is 9%.

Lesson: Growth comes from keeping your customers.

5. The hardest skill isn’t fundraising or marketing—it’s motivation.​
Most companies die not because they’re bad, but because the founders get tired of suffering & run out of steam, and refuse to keep fighting.

There was a period of 18 months at Heights when we literally didn't grow at all, in fact we were shrinking, we had to let go of most of our team to save the company, we had a big founder fall out, everything was grim. There were many moments we wanted to quit, and in those moments, we still turned around to our team and motivated the hell out of them.

Lesson: If you cant make it, fake it.

6. Co - Founder relationships aren't based on skills.

It's a common claim that co founders need complementary skills, and whilst it helps, its not everything. Yes, my co founder Joel is great at strategy ops and finance whilst I excel in comms, marketing and brand. However, we've both done most the jobs at the company, and either way the real skill you need to learn as you scale is leadership and delegation.

The one skill you cant teach, you cant learn, you can only earn over time - is trust.

Lesson: Looking for a partner? Focus on trust, not skills.

7. Build in public, not stealth.

No bigger red flag than stupid 'stealth mode' I see on Linkedin. Look, unless you've just discovered the fucking atom bomb, you're not that smart, other people can do what you are doing, and the only real moat is customers, and feedback loops so you build the best product or sales or marketing engine - or ideally, all of the above.

Your enemy is obscurity, not competition.

When I started Heights - I shared everything every month, every number, every challenge, every issue, all our problems. It built a real dedicated '1,000 true fans' vibe to our brand and people loved us for the raw and real insights into starting a company. Yes, all our competitors could, can and still do see all our public info. So what? I took this a step further by publicly sharing all our investor decks too. Genuinely - the way Heights wins is by making the best product.

Looking at it through that lens - how does competitors knowing about our challenges and weaknesses change how they can compete with us? It cant. Your job is to build relevance - go tell the world who you are.

Lesson: Build in public, not private. Never say the words 'stealth mode'. Vom.

8. Dont get tempted by vibes.

Everywhere I look - there's a brand doing cooler stuff than us. Awesome activations, wittier marketing, events events events.

That's cool - man they make an awesome social post. The thing is - most of those things bring in fuck all customers. In fact - they often just entertain freeloaders and people exchanging likes for cash.

I think almost all our competitors I can think of do better social than us, better brand activation storytelling than us, better outdoor marketing than us (easy as we've never done any but you get my point).

You know what we do better than them? 2 things:

1. Marketing that wins over our core customer to try us
2. Even better marketing that keeps those customers and turns them into lifelong subscribers.

I openly admit with my team all the time how envious I am of other brands' coolness compared to what we could be doing - but we always remember to focus our energy on winning.

Lesson: Success is hidden in valuable metrics like revenue, not likes on social media. Payday every month should remind you of where to focus.

9. Nothing compounds like trust.​
Every interaction with customers, team, and investors is a deposit—or a withdrawal—in the trust bank. A brand is just a story of your commitment to a customer, and the journey of transformation you will take them on. It is a promise, and when you break that promise, you fail as a brand.

We did this last August - we grew too fast, went from £7M to £10M too quickly, our ops broke and we missed deliveries for loads of customers - severely impacting our trust, We could have said sorry and tried to style it out but instead we refunded every customer we were late on deliveries for. That hurt us. We lost £750,000 doing it. But we kept those customers - and they are still with us - because they know that when we fuck up, we own it, and it will cost us, not them.

Lesson: Trust is brand - you build it or lose it.

10. Keep your culture and values fluid, not static.

A big mistake I see founders make - is getting excited about values and living them, and not noticing when its time to update, refresh or totally overhaul them. In 5 years at Heights, we've overhauled our values 3 times.

Today they are:
1. Obsess over outcomes

2. Simplify to amplify

3. Reach Our Heights

They used to be different - but the point is, at various points in your journey, depending on your strategy and goals, you'll need to update these - and bring the team along for the journey in creating them.

Culture changes based on goals, ambitions, intentions, and who you hire but it's all one big breathing manifestation of who you are as a company so if you are growing, they should of course be directionally similar but still, like you, grow and evolve over time - to meet the moment and help you fulfil your destiny, and reach your heights.

Lesson: Cherish your values and culture but know when its time to say goodbye, adapt, and grow up.

A final word.

I need to remind you of this:

Less than 10 years ago I was depressed on anti depressants, out of a job, single, fucking lonely but... I always believed I was one self help book, moment of clarity, insight, inspiration strike, or lucky intervention away from changing my life.

What really matters - is I didnt give up. I didn't let myself stay that person, I believed that over time, building small habits, I could change.

Today, I'm married with 2 daughters, living in a stunning home with my 2 best friends (my cats), with an awesome business, lots of friends and hey, even a few thousand newsletter readers interested enough in this journey to still be reading.

It seriously fucking matters that you know that if this can happen to me - it can happen to you. Nothing is guaranteed - not my success from here, nor yours. However, we all have it in us to never lose hope, keep the faith, and believe in a better future.

Whether it takes a year or a decade - the only way to reach your heights - is to never give up hope, and to stay committed that this month, you will be a tiny bit better than you last month.

With love and success to you,

Dan

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SOS (Science of Success) Curated:

LinkedIn of the week: Most managers don’t realize they’re micromanaging until the damage is already done​

Podcast of the week: Effects of Fasting & Time Restricted Eating on Fat Loss & Health​

My Tweet of the week: £20M ARR at Heights ($27M)! ​

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1-1 Coaching with Dan

In my goal to help more entrepreneurs/people who are looking to level up their careers, I've just started taking 1-1 consulting calls (only 1 a week)

Why book a call? Some of my expertise/success:

I've built 5 startups. 1 win, 1 fail, and 3 still going.

E-Commerce: Heights - with revenue over £20M a year.

Community: Foundrs, one of the UK's top founder communities

Podcasting: Leaders Media - bootstrapped media company that makes the UK's top business podcasts, Secret Leaders, with over 50M downloads.

Health/Mental Health: Managed to overcome burnout, insomnia, depression & anxiety in pursuit of success as I talk about in my interview with Steven Bartlett on Diary of a CEO​

Angel Investing: I've invested in over 90 startups

Coached & Mentored: Certified coach & done lots of mentoring

Personal Brand: Have grown to 200k on LinkedIn and 150k on X (Twitter) in the past 12 months

So if you're interested in booking a session with me to talk all things business or building a personal brand, book for 30-minutes or 45-minutes. (limited spots).

Science of Success Vault

I'm building a vault of valuable tools, resources, and one sheets that I hope help you succeed.

These will be stored in the ever-growing 'Science of Success' vault - you can always access that here

Want to take your success (even more) seriously? 👇​
🧠 Fuel your brain and feed your gut, try Heights here (use code 'SOSDMS' for 15% off your first month of any subscription

🎧 Check out my podcast Secret Leaders here​

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